My startup banking story (2023)

Funny to see this pop up again (I'm the author). The year is now 2025 and I still use Chase as a personal bank and I'm now discovering new funny banking behaviors. I'll use this as a chance to share. :)

My company had an exit, I did well financially. This is not a secret. I'm extremely privileged and thankful for it. But as a result of this, I've used a private bank (or mix) for a number of years to store the vast majority of my financial assets (over 99.99% of all assets, I just did the math). An unfortunate property of private banks is they make it hard to do retail-like banking behaviors: depositing a quick check, pulling cash from an ATM, but ironically most importantly Zelle.

As such, I've kept my Chase personal accounts and use them as my retail bank: there are Chase branches everywhere, its easy to get to an ATM, and they give me easy access to Zelle! I didn't choose Chase specifically, I've just always used Chase for personal banking since I was in high school so I just kept using them for this.

Anyways, I tend to use my Chase account to pay a bunch of bills, just because it's more convenient (Zelle!). I have 3 active home construction projects, plus pay my CC, plus pretty much all other typical expenses (utilities, car payments, insurance, etc.). But I float the money in/out of the account as necessary to cover these. We do accounting of all these expenses at the private bank side, so its all tracked, but it settles within the last 24-48 hours via Chase.

Otherwise, I keep my Chase balance no more than a few thousand dollars.

This really wigs out automated systems at Chase. I get phone calls all the time (like, literally multiple times per week) saying "we noticed a large transfer into your account, we can help!" And I cheekily respond "refresh, it's back to zero!" And they're just confused. To be fair, I've explained the situation in detail to multiple people multiple times but it isn't clicking, so they keep calling me.

I now ignore the phone calls. Hope I don't regret that later lol.

The fraud story is interesting, but something I had hoped would be addressed by the end of the post, wasn't. You wrote:

>Someone out there is probably mentally screaming at me "you fool!" at this point. With hindsight, I agree...

I was hoping the piece would end with what you would do now (or what should you have done) when Alex called you. Did I fail to understand something in the piece, and simply staying on the phone with Alex would have somehow avoided the fraud situation down the line? It doesn't seem so?

If I were to get such a call, today, my instincts would be to engage in the same "I'm fine" get-off-the-phone-fast actions. What is the alternative?

I would imagine this phone call's primary goal is trying to sell you higher margin financial products/services.

The way you phrase that, it sounds like these services are more advantageous to the bank, but possibly not to the account holder? If so, that goes against the tone of the article, where Mitchell implies (I think?) that he would have benefited more from speaking to Alex than the other way around.

Not really, these are probably mutually beneficial. Having $35 million sitting in a cash account is, as Mitchell recalls in the article, pretty bad -- you're forgoing a lot of benefit for yourself.

What the bank is probably mainly trying to do is not "extract a higher margin" from you, but rather to "maintain your business." While Alex might not have recognized that a startup that took in a bunch of financing and plopped it into a cash account and then didn't do much with it is a customer who might disappear at any time, on some institutional level the bank is aware of it. They want you to regard them not as an interchangeable place that money sits, but as a valued partner who helps you do things with your money, and as a result you feel like it would both be a risk and a bother to extract all your money and go to some other bank.